Not that long ago in the
scheme of things, environmentalism was pretty much a non-partisan issue.
Keeping air and water clean was seen as necessary by all sensible people after
events like Ohio’s Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969 and the big oil spill
off the Santa Barbara coast from an ocean drilling rig the same year. Senator
Gaylord Nelson helped found Earth Day 1970 and led in the creation of
legislation to protect air and water quality. The media began reporting on
sustainability issues like overlogging and overfishing which damaged nature’s
ability to replenish the living things we humans need.

Overpopulation
was also discussed in a realistic manner in those days of pre-PC
environmentalism. In 1970, the planet was home to around 3.7 billion souls, and
mathematically realistic persons warned that the ballooning number of humans
would be harmful to natural systems, not to mention the likely wars over
resources to come. Population stabilization was a widely agreed-upon goal, both
for the globe and also in high-consuming America.

Now, however, the world population is well
into seven billion, and nobody talks about it. There has been an inverse
relationship between the solvability of overpopulation and the discussion about
it — the worse the problem gets, the more it is off the table in polite
society.

What happened?
We were doing pretty well for a while, at least in the U.S. But basic principles
have been abandoned between the modern birth of the environmental movement and
now.

In an important
example of integrity lost, the devolution of the environmental movement’s
flagship organization, the Sierra Club, is instructive. In 1996 some concerned
members of the club objected to the organization’s change to remove immigration
limitation as part of general policy. In 1989, the official position was
“Immigration to the U.S. should be no greater than that which will permit
achievement of population stabilization in the U.S.,” but that policy was
rescinded. The grassroots members organized to place the issue before the
entire membership as a ballot proposition, done by collecting enough signatures
to make the initiative part of the annual election. The result was a firestorm
of vicious attacks from the club’s management that lasted for years, until it
was finally learned in 2004 that a billionaire donor had specified his
generosity would dry up if the Sierra Club ever identified immigration-fueled
population growth as a negative environmental influence. Wall Street brainiac
David Gelbaum gave over $100 million for land purchase and preservation, but
warned,
“I did tell
[Sierra Club Executive Director
] Carl
Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they
would never get a dollar from me.”

The Sierra Club
collapsed like a cheap lawn chair in the face of so much money, and had no
trouble in selling its virtue for $100 million, and it did so in secret while
outwardly attempting character assassination on principled opponents by calling
them racists. When the truth was told, the club’s priorities demonstrated that
it was just another money-grubbing non-profit with pretensions of morality.

Did the Gelbaum
big-money bribe signal the end of the environmental movement as an honorable
endeavor? It should have, but the lapdog liberal media weren’t interested in
the Enron scandal of the greens, so the public didn’t learn that the Sierra
Club’s integrity had been sold, and the mendacious perps got off with no
blemishes to their reputations.

The biggest
loser was the American public, which no longer had a strong environmental voice
calling for population sanity. And of course the environment lost, with the
downside of population growth left out of public policy discussions. One
practical example: productive farmland is rapidly being turned into housing for
the growing numbers of residents. In California (pop. 37,691,912 — July 2011),
more than 60 percent of developed land in the Central Valley was previously prime farm acreage,
according to a recent accounting by the American Farmland Trust.

In 2001, Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz wrote a
lengthy paper observing the changes in the movement titled “Forsaking
Fundamentals: The Environmental Establishment Abandons U.S. Population
Stabilization.” It noted that among the many pressures arrayed against
prudent policies were the dropping fertility rate among Americans plus the
growing effects of the 1965 immigration legislation opening the doors to tens
of millions. It would have been a waste of time for population Cassandras to
convince young American women to have smaller families, since the new top
contributor became mostly non-white foreigners entering at breakneck speed.

Since then, the refashioning of the
environmental movement into a whole new agenda has continued. In the following
decade, traditional concerns of conservationists were largely put aside for the
new emphasis on global warming, or “climate change” as it is more shrewdly
characterized. As an all-encompassing cause, climate has the advantage of being
a central organizing principle that simplifies fund-raising and messaging.
Plus, left-wing supporters of big government find the threat of future disaster
to be a handy stick for further intrusion of regulations into every aspect of
society.

In addition, the
Sierra Club, has become a green purveyor of the diversity-is-best ideology, and
now takes pains to appease its open-borders colleagues of the Democratic Party,
particularly the Mexican ones with whom Sierra honchos have a corrupt political
arrangement of convenience. One symptom is the club’s outspoken opposition to a
border fence, portrayed in a 20-minute agitprop film titled “Wild Versus Wall.”
The club objects to the “militarization” of the border while it ignores the
mountains of trash dumped by illegal crossers. It was reported in March 2012
that the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality estimates that illegal
aliens leave behind about 2,000 tons of trash every year. Isn’t that garbage
plus millions of feet tromping through the desert a severe environmental
problem? Sierra management thinks not.

Even more
remarkably, the Sierra Club has raised no hue and cry over Mexican
marijuana-growing mobsters’ takeover of parts of Sequoia and Yosemite, the
crown jewels of the park system. What would John Muir think of his beloved
Yosemite being poisoned and despoiled by foreign thugs, while the organization
he founded remains silent on the destruction because of unprincipled politics?

The Sierra Club
appears quite comfortable in the more partisan political climate of today. One
hears no regrets for the loss of reaching across ideological lines to partner
in environmental protection. Also missing are traditional conservationists in
leadership, such as the late Dr. Edgar Wayburn, a lifelong Republican who
served as president of the club for five terms and led campaigns that acquired
more than 100 million acres in wilderness and parklands, including Point Reyes
National Seashore and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Today’s Sierra
leadership is well vetted to be global and lean properly left.

In short, the
Sierra Club has shelved its mission of being a non-partisan protector of the
earth to become a left-wing diversity organization with hiking boots. It has
corrupted itself with both money (the Gelbaum bribe of $100 million to ignore
immigration) and socialist ideology, including support for massive immigration
to alter American society by flooding the nation with millions who prefer big
government. The club now follows the Saul Alinsky leftist playbook of
demonizing anyone who disagrees with the party line, such as when it shamefully
accused members of racism for arguing against the political switch about
immigration. That conflagration of lies occurred during the crucial 2004
election, when one of the reformers running for election to the Sierra board of
directors was black (Frank Morris) and another was the former Democratic
governor of Colorado, Dick Lamm, who also helped found the campus NAACP at UC
Berkeley in 1959! These highly qualified candidates were excoriated by the
Sierra Club and its MoveOn.org digital goon squad, and their scurrilous
accusations were repeated by the compliant mainstream press.

Sadly, the
devolution of the Sierra Club into yet another leftist hack organization is not
so unusual. The trend away from values like traditional conservation is on the
uptick. The universities have been foundational in spreading left-wing ideas
like one-worlder politics combined with tribal loyalties cleverly characterized
as “diversity.” Those notions have filtered down to the point where grade
school kids are indoctrinated with issues of cultural identity where diversity
is celebrated, instead of young students being taught America’s history and
traditions.

Diversity is
presented as an unassailable virtue in the new secular society, replacing the
older values of patriotism and religion. Victor Davis Hanson reflected in his
excellent 2002 article, “The Civic Education America Needs,” on how in the
1960s his central California school taught American exceptionalism to the kids
even though most were of Mexican heritage. Nowadays the brown kids are
inculcated with the culture of the failing state their parents fled.
Assimilation is not fashionable among the left.

The idea of
diversity has been used like a club, to force obedience to the utopian
multicultural state, as traditional Americans are assailed by affirmative
action and benefits for illegal aliens, which are not available to citizens.
Persons brave enough to voice environmental arguments against
immigration-fueled overpopulation (like water supply!) are smacked down as Bad
People or Racists, using the Alinsky strategy of personal demonization via
name-calling or worse.

The nonprofit Earthjustice has a catchy motto:
“Because the earth needs a good lawyer.” (Interestingly, the organization was
founded in 1971 as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.) In addition to lawyers,
the earth also needs an honest voice with genuine sustainability in mind. Environmental
groups have lost the vital overpopulation message in their move toward cultural
sensitivity and broader political influence. They define overpopulation as a
global problem only, and then with little enthusiasm if the topic is mentioned
at all. But the whole point of the Sierra Club reform movement discussed
earlier was that millions of additional immigrants coming to the U.S. would
vastly increase their resource usage compared to what it would have been at
home. American families have become smaller since the Baby Boom, and the
country would have been approaching a near-sustainable population if the
tsunami of legal and illegal immigration had not been unleashed in 1965.

There are other,
more immediate arguments to end mass immigration, such as crime, gangs, failing
schools, and ethnic fragmentation. But leaving an America with a billion residents in
a hundred years would be a sorry end to a once great country, showing that we
were unable to preserve our own society and values in the face of big-money
interests. The big brains over at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobby for
endless population growth because it’s such an easy way to make piles of money.
But growth as the controlling principle of the country certainly doesn’t help
the average citizen whose income is suffering, and too many people lead to the
loss of quality of life for all.

The environmental argument against unlimited
immigration is the strongest and most principled. When an environmentalist
declares that America is full and immigration should end, period, there is no
racial or ethnic component. It would be similar to the Census declaring in 1890
that the frontier was closed because there were no tracts of land remaining
with no settlement.
In 1968, British statesman Enoch Powell began his now famous 1968 speech with
an observation that could have been made by an environmentalist: “The supreme
function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.” Isn’t the
immigration-fueled overpopulation of our beautiful country the most preventable
evil of all?

It would help to have an ethical and responsible
environmental movement to speak honestly about the effect on natural systems of
so many humans on the earth and in this country, but there is no such voice
now.